Enough with the Fear of Fat

In a society obsessed with body image and marked by a fear of fat, Kelli Jean Drinkwater engages in radical body politics through art. She confronts the public’s perception of bigger bodies by bringing them into spaces that were once off limits — from fashion runways to the Sydney Festival — and entices all of us to look again and rethink our biases. “Unapologetic fat bodies can blow people’s minds,” she says.

“Like any form of systematic oppression,fatphobia is deeply rooted in complex structureslike capitalism, patriarchy and racism,and that can make it really difficult to see,let alone challenge.We live in a culture where being fat is seen as being a bad person —lazy, greedy, unhealthy, irresponsibleand morally suspect.And we tend to see thinnessas being universally good —responsible, successful,and in control of our appetites, bodies and lives.We see these ideas again and againin the media, in public health policy,doctors’ offices,in everyday conversationsand in our own attitudes.We may even blame fat people themselvesfor the discrimination they facebecause, after all, if we don’t like it, we should just lose weight.Easy.This anti-fat bias has become so integral, so ingrainedto how we value ourselves and each otherthat we rarely question why we have such contempt for people of sizeand where that disdain comes from.”

Global Village Space has been created as a web portal for the disseminating information and knowledge from our writers to our readers. It is not about us but about you. It developed as an idea from a newsletter we have been producing and been sending out the past several years. The special essence of that newsletter was to provide our readers different viewpoints on the same issue without us the ‘moderator’ imposing our own viewpoint.